B2B marketing is complex. Sales cycles are long, measurement can be convoluted, and segmentation, lead scoring and sales and marketing alignment take traditional marketers into uncomfortable spaces.

Amid the details and uncomfortable spaces, the bigger marketing picture is often lost.

Take a step back and consider the three bigger picture items below. How can you improve each of these things? If you continually improve each of these areas, it will benefit nearly every facet of your marketing.

1. Delivering Valuable Information

Marketers have been blinded by the mandate to create content. However, buyers don’t need content. Buyers need information. Content is the package that makes your information attractive, discoverable, consumable and sharable.

You need to understand the information your buyers need and deliver it in a way that is easy for them to access and consume throughout the entire relationship with your company.

2. Creating Demand

Today, too many marketers are focused on a lead, or a contact record in their database that meets certain criteria.

Demand generation, in contrast to lead generation, requires changing what is in your buyer’s mind, not what is in your database. Until your marketing efforts create a level of demand, you are not setting your sales team up to succeed.

3. Long-Term Planning

Buyers needs do not turn on and off the way your marketing campaigns do. Your information and solutions need to be available and easily discoverable whenever buyers are interested.

Short-term planning often leads to reactionary activity and random acts of marketing. Focusing on your current campaign theme means your marketing is always focused on you when it should be focused on your audience.

The recent rise of inbound marketing is, in part, reflective of the new buyer that is in control of much of the buying process. Now marketers need to bring this long-term audience-centric mindset to all lead generation and demand generation activities.

Your Turn

What other parts of the bigger picture marketing fundamentals are being lost in B2B marketing?

Share your opinion in the comments below or with me on Twitter (@wittlake).

This post expands on a perspective I originally provided for Neolane and was published here.
Photo Credit: Beach Wood IV by rachel_thecat on Flickr. Text added by the author.